Stephen Hawking starts biggest-ever hunt for alien life

7/20/2015

Share it:

British cosmologist Stephen
Hawking on Monday launched
the biggest-ever hunt for intelligent life in the cosmos in a 10-year,
$100-million (143-million-euro) mission to scan the skies. The Breakthrough
Listen project, supported by Russian Silicon Valley entrepreneur Yuri Milner,
will be the most dominant, widespread and thorough scientific search ever
started for signs of extra-terrestrial intelligent life. Stephen Hawking at the
launch event at the Royal Society science academy in London, said "In an
infinite universe, there must be other occurrences of life.

"Somewhere in the
cosmos, perhaps, intelligent life may be watching," "Either way,
there is no bigger question. It's time to commit to finding the answer, to
search for life beyond Earth. We must know."

The plan is to look for radio and laser broadcasts from 1 million of the sun’s
nearby neighbors in addition to 100 of the nearby galaxies. This project
promises up to 25 percent of the time accessible on two radio telescopes: Green
Bank in West Virginia and Parkes in Australia. These tools should be able to
pick up transmissions as dominant as aircraft radar coming from any one of the 1,000
nearest stars. The initiative is
associated with the Breakthrough Message project, an international struggle
to generate digital messages that characterize humanity. There is no promise to
send any messages into space, and the project should trigger debate about
whether humans should be sending messages at all out into the void.

The money, to be spent over
the next 10 years, will also provide assistance in developinh the software required
to powerfully eavesdrop on our fellow galactic citizens